Recent years have witnessed a new wave of scholarly works in English on Japan's colonial past. Monographs and edited volumes by Mark Peattie, Peter Duus, Louise Young and Tak Matsusaka, among others, have greatly enriched our understanding of the social economic, political and cultural aspects of Japan's formal and informal empires. While many of these works tend to focus on specific geographical areas, a number of essays, notably those by Peattie, have probed Japanese attitudes toward colonialism in general.
In this intellectual biography of Tadao Yanaihara, a leading Japanese authority on colonial policy before the Asia Pacific War, Susan Townsend goes a step further. By weaving together Yanaihara's representative works on colonial administration with salient developments in Japan's wide-flung overseas colonies as well as in China, she provides a panoramic -- if still somewhat selective -- survey of Japan's entire colonial history.
Beginning with Yanaihara's "encounter with bandits" in Manchuria shortly after the Japanese invasion in 1931, Townsend devotes the first three chapters to tracing his intellectual background and analyzing his basic theory of colonization. In each of five chapters that follow, on Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, the South Sea Islands and China respectively, she goes into greater depth in examining Yanaihara's assessment of the specific conditions of these areas and his subsequent recommendations. In the final chapter, after discussing the 1937 "Yanaihara Incident," which forced him out of Tokyo Imperial University, Townsend summarizes her analysis and offers some general comparisons.
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